It’s that wonderful time of the year again where QPR’s second string taking our FA Cup lives in their hands coincides with attempts at budget surgery on the squad in the January transfer window.
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Playing the Monday morning quarterback is part of being a sports fan.
It’s amazing what you can achieve with hindsight. Ilias Chair dribbles round half the Sheff Utd defence and scores, he’s won the game, he’s the man of the match, and the hero. Instead, the shot is blocked, when there is a pass on, and he’s a greedy little fucker. No football fan has ever taken a shot on when he should have passed when talking about what the player could have, would have, should have done the morning after the game before. No football fan has ever got their team selection wrong, and the substitutions the idiot in the dugout definitely should have made certainly would have worked had he only given the idea a chance. And transfers: we point at the ones that went wrong for our club and say "should have known he’d be shit”; and the successes in other teams and say "should have gone for him instead”. Never, ever has a bad signing been made by a message boarder.
Hell, it's the whole reasons sites like this exist, right? Though I desperately try and avoid doing that with LFW. I’ll come away from games with opinions, often quite strong opinions, but I do like frequently temper those with the qualification that I’ve never played, managed or coached football at any kind of level, so what really do I know about it? We’ll stand and watch that insipid nonsense QPR phoned in at Coventry recently, for example, and come away wondering why Mick Beale was so slow to react from the sideline and change things — but I will immediately also add that if you look along the QPR bench that day there’s not a lot of big game impact sitting there waiting to be called upon, and if you think QPR are only one manager who makes better substitutions away from cracking this then you’re a fool. If you watch a lot of football then, like me, I’m sure there will be players and signings you’d like to see us make, and when they go elsewhere that’s very frustrating, but I always think it’s important to say that I wrote about Clint Hill and Shaun Derry being ropey signings, Steven Caulker and Jordan Mutch brilliant ones. I thought Jordan Cousins was pound-for-pound the best signing in the Championship that summer, and I was jealous when Ipswich’s Paul Hurst revolution was led by the capture of Jon Nolan who I’d seen extensively at Grimsby, Lincoln and Shrewsbury and liked a great deal — these days Cousins can’t get in a crap Wigan team, Nolan’s at Tranmere and Ipswich are only just recovering now from that disastrous relegation season.
It is always really easy sitting up here, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. Particularly in weeks like this where, at the second time of asking, we’ve managed to shake hands with Macauley Bonne on a contract settlement to hopefully start clearing enough financial headroom for some transfer window tinkering. Bonne, never knowingly onside, scored just three times from ten starts and 34 sub appearances during a desperately poor two-and-a-half-years here. I don’t think it’s hindsight to say we obviously overpaid for him — I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Lee Bowyer crack a smile when he was asked why Charlton had gone ahead with the deal — and it is incredibly frustrating when you think how much of what little money we have had to spend in recent years has been wasted on signings like him, Cousins, Sean Goss, Ariel Borysiuk, Conor Washington, James Perch etc.
Bonne was a swing and a miss, sure, but not a totally ridiculous ball to go after. It was a chance to own a striker within our budget, which we’d struggled to do, and might have helped reduce our reliance on loans up front that had turned up two Tomer Hemeds for every one Nahki Wells at that stage. At Orient he’d been exactly the sort of prolific lower league striker wise Twitter sages often lament us not going after. And even at Charlton he’d scored 12 goals in 32 starts in a struggling Championship team without taking the penalties — Keane Lewis Potter and Lewis Grabban among the 12 goal hauls in last season’s Championship. It’s easy to say now it was a ridiculous signing, but it wasn’t that outlandish at the time. Nor George Thomas, a young player who we’d tracked when doing well at Coventry, who got a Premier League move that didn’t work out (not altogether surprising given the team Leicester had in front of him at the time), then available on a free. Shoot me down if you like, but they weren’t, and it really irritates me when, for example, some of the most vociferous social media accounts, replying to every club Tweet with "this isn't Austin" and "I'm keeping nanna in a cage until Austin signs" are then the first, and often the most vile and aggressive, to pile into Austin's DMs calling him every name under the sun when it turns out that signing didn't work out as hoped.
I do, honestly, share the frustrations of everybody reading this piece - and I’ll be giving the club a bit of a kicking in a moment so this isn’t any sort of puff piece. Our inability to change games positively and proactively from the bench is, like I say, because successive managers now have looked along that bench and seen only Bonne and Thomas-types staring back at them. We wanted Beale to make more changes, earlier, at Coventry, and Neil Critchley to perhaps get some fresher legs on for the final effort against Sheff Utd on Monday, but, if we’re really honest, who out of the subs available to them in those games — Kakay, Hamalainen, Shodipo, Thomas, Armstrong, Adomah, Masterson, Amos, Richards — really screams out to you in either situation? That bench is frequently made up of academy graduates given (frequently renewed) contracts despite seldom showing any ability at our level of the sport, and transfers that haven’t worked. As we keep saying, we have a good starting 11 beneath the surface of which lies fresh air, and whenever one or two key players from the first team are injured or off form our results collapse. It’s another reason we approach games like tomorrow at Fleetwood with some trepidation — it was a very QPR thing to do to come to places like this and lose even when we had a great team in the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s certainly the case now when you know any temptation to rest Chris Willock and the like will mean him being replaced with somebody who wouldn’t even get in the Fleetwood team themselves.
The people responsible for those players being there need to be judged by their record, and as I said last week it is galling to see Luton’s team (and particularly their strikers), assembled for less than we’ve spent on transfer fees and wages, come and run the rounds of the kitchen through us. Nevertheless, the ratio of hits to misses in football transfers is somewhere around 1:3 or 1:4 and that’s particularly the case when you’re trying to do it on a low-ish budget. We've recently felt the sharp end of the Luton signings that worked, but two others they brought in 18 months ago, both of whom I think we'd have talked quite positively about had we signed them, are back in League One in the Fleetwood squad we face tomorrow.
Where I do get annoyed with QPR is where they don’t follow ‘the rules’ when recruiting players. When the ethos and the strategy becomes muddied by signing somebody who fits neither purely because the manager quite likes him. Perhaps this is just a product of me having to sit here and trot out articles analysing what they’re doing and who they’re signing every bloody week, when you really never know whether one will work out or not and my record on guessing which way it will go is pretty ordinary, but in my mind when you look at our set up, and the set up of other clubs that do well in this division on challenging budgets, there are certain ‘rules’ to follow to give yourself a better chance. Stuff like age of the player, sell-on value, not only doing well previously but doing it in a poor team or challenging environment because that’s what you’ll be coming into here, data and analytics-led and so on… Or, more to the point, not a player who’s here because we like dealing with the agent, or because the manager likes playing golf with him, or because the owner players Fifa with him… and as few older players with no sell-on potential, or loans we can never possibly own playing in front of other younger players, as possible.
You can always point to exceptions that blow all this up - loan players who were key in a team’s achievement for example - or debate (as we did here last week) about whether this player development model actually stands any chance of success now the Championship transfer market has collapsed. But if that is the model, then you cannot let Mark Warburton sign and renew contracts for Moses Odubajo and Lee Wallace who he’s worked with before, because then when you sack Mark Warburton you’ve got no full backs and no money left to do anything about it. We can sit here and critique the various cogs in this machine, and you’ll all have your own opinion about who’s doing a good job or not, but for me it feels like we often have a director of football pushing certain players for a certain reason, a head of recruitment doing the same, and a manager desperate not to be sacked six games from now pulling in another direction still.
Mick Beale has shafted us this season by walking out, and it’s always messy when you have a mid-season managerial change and the new guy is trying to adjust the seat to a setting he likes while throttling along in the outside lane playing two or three games a week. But we’re particularly shafted because we allowed him to bring in his signings last summer and I once again sat there in a pre-season interview listening to a manager talking about the agents he’d been speaking to about players. If this is our model — director of football, head of recruitment, player development — you can’t let a manager bring in Leon Balogun. Tim Iroegbunam is here because Beale loves him, and he has been a good signing in that he’s improved the team somewhat as a more dynamic midfielder who can get forward and change the attack, which we didn’t have and couldn’t afford to his level. But we’ve no chance of ever owning Iroegbunam, and at the moment he’s playing every game ahead of players we do. If you get promoted doing that then all bets are off, but if you don’t then you’re better off finishing sixteenth with Luke Amos in midfield than you are tenth where we are now with an Aston Villa player learning on your time.
The result is the rather tricky transfer window we’re seeing develop in front of us now, where we’ve got a new manager that would like to adjust things, we’re super tight for money, and we’ve only got one more loan spot left. Per the latest from West London Sport we’re having to pay a player up early to create enough financial headroom to, in all likelihood, loan another in his position. We’d like to send one of our other loans back, but he’s played too many times under the previous manager for us to activate that clause. We’re thinking of spending what little money there is making the loan permanent of a player who’s only been able to start one game for us so far, apparently to clear a loan spot to borrow another Premier League player which will in turn push the one we’ve bought further down the pecking order still.
There’s little point getting het up about this until we see how January pans out, because it’s all speculation at this stage. It’s always going to feel a little messy when you change manager midway through a season, and in this case that change was not of our doing. But it also feels messy, for me, because we still too often do ‘what manager wants manager gets’ while at the same time also trying to run a more progressive, forward-thinking model under a DOF, and a (very good, for my money) head of recruitment. Still, if there’s any shred of truth in any of that piece from WLS, it does rather feel like trying to extricate yourself from a hole by making the hole bigger.
We’ll have a better idea at the end of the month. Even then some transfer windows that look brilliant and seemingly set you up for a promotion push (summer 2021) turn out to be nothing of the sort, while others that look panicked and papering over cracks (January 2021) actually work brilliantly. It’s not an exact science, and none of my mistakes (or yours) matter at all — the manager isn’t looking along the bench and seeing Jon Nolan sitting there, I just move on to spouting off in the next match preview or report and am unlucky if either regular reader even remembers me saying Steven Caulker was a failsafe signing.
Such is the varying lives of the manager, the director of football, the head of recruitment and the Monday morning quarterback.
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Team News: As ever, the team selection for these things is often more interesting than the match. I would say Seny Dieng or Jordan Archer, but then Archer didn’t even make the bench against Sheff Utd and I doubt they’d risk Murphy Mahoney, so who knows. Jake Clarke-Salter and Andre Dozzell have been ill, so you’d think they’d be back now. Stefan Johansen is back in contact training but definitely won’t be risked here. Leon Balogun I’m starting to think is a fictitious character invented entirely to annoy me.
Watch out for Jimmy Dunne potentially getting a bit of a hot reception on his first return to Highbury Stadium. Then a Burnley player, Dunne had a season-long loan spell at Highbury cut short in the 2019/20 campaign for a "breach of discipline”, along with fellow loanee Ash Hunter. The reasons for this were never made public but were said to relate to the leaking of Fleetwood’s team selection, deliberate or otherwise, for a derby game against Blackpool via friends who played for the Tangerines. Given the Fleetwood manager at the time was Joey Barton, who knows how much of any of this is based in any truth whatsoever.
Luton loanee Carlos Mendes Gomes is the star man in these parts, we wait to see whether his loan and Admiral Muskwe’s shore leave will be extended to cover a cup game.
Elsewhere: The FA Cup’s schedule, particularly for the third round, continues to completely obliterated by its various broadcast deals. The 32 fixtures are this weekend spread across four days and ten different kick off times. This includes moving five matches to Saturday lunchtime, four to Saturday early evening and six to various slots on Sunday despite them not being televised in the UK, under a sort of vague catch-all excuse of "foreign broadcast commitments”. I’m sure the people of El Salvador cannot fucking wait for Stockport v Walsall at 14.00 on Sunday, and that wait between connections at Singapore Airport will simply fly past with Preston v Huddersfield to watch at 12.30 on Saturday.
Said broadcasters like to make an enormous, hammed up deal about the supposed "magic” of this competition. Expect wall-to-wall footage of Sutton knocking out Coventry, Hereford trampling over Newcastle, Dan Walker giving the full Alan Partridge treatment to somebody who combines washing the Stevenage kit with occasionally pulling a pint in the supporters club, and Mark Clemmit rummaging through a the kitchen cupboards of some muscly boy who combines a sports science degree at Durham University with scoring occasional goals for Hartlepool. Generic, predictable, patronising, cartoonish, cliched shite — all of it, all of it, completely undermined by the games they do pick for live broadcast, which have all the magic of getting caught short and having to go for a shit at Winter Wonderland.
Sit down tonight, for instance, and enjoy that most romantic and magical of FA Cup ties, Man Utd Reserves v Everton Reserves — a seventeenth meeting between the clubs in the last seven years, the vast majority of them televised. Or, if that doesn’t float your boat, how about Liverpool Reserves v Wolves Reserves at 20.00 on a Saturday night? Just the nine meetings and eight Liverpool wins over the last four seasons there, a real rare treat for the viewing public. And if you didn’t get enough Man City v Chelsea into you, let me see here, LAST NIGHT, then good news… that’s on again for you on Sunday. Maybe Graham Potter will successfully see out his 0-0 draw this time, and we can all sit down and watch the whole thing again for a third time next week taking us to a slim 32 meetings between the sides in the last ten years. I have close relatives I’ve seen less often than Chelsea playing Manchester fucking City.
The ever-so-slightly more imaginative picks see Newcastle Reserves go to League One Sheff Wed on Saturday evening, Arsenal Reserves also face third tier opposition at Oxford on Monday, and Leeds Would Have Taken More Reserves at Cardiff on Sunday — any romanticism about Sam Hamman and the Bluebirds upsetting Champions League opposition at Ninian Park back in the day rather sterilised by a terrible Cardiff team now playing home games in a half empty shell across the road, and Leeds being a bit shit themselves these days.
Several other examples of Premier League sides heading into lower league danger zones escaped the TV exec clutches, though not the kick off moves like I say, because they’re so enraptured with all top flight ties: Leicester Reserves are at 92/92 Gillingham; Nottingham Forest’s ongoing re-enactment of the feeding of the 5,000 takes a tour date in Blackpool; Fulham Reserves are at Hull; and Brighton Reserves are at Middlesbrough, who’ve just added a play-off bothering Cameron Archer to a team already bang in form.
Watch out, too, for some Championship teams batting on sticky wickets. It’s three defeats in a row and one win from seven now for Birmingham, doing quite well under John Eustace through the autumn but now seemingly lining up their annual collapse through the second half of the season which will see them win one of 25 matches and somehow not get relegated regardless — Forest Green Rovers away awaits them. I wish Steve Bruce was still at West Brom for all sorts of comedy purposes, but mostly to watch him stand there on Match of the Day and watch him lose to Chesterfield this weekend while a pundit who watches as much of our league as I do the Six Nations opines that "Brucey” is a "great guy” who "the fans need to get behind” and "will turn it around given time”. Sadly, with Carlos Corberan now boasting eight wins from nine since replacing him, eight clean sheets in that time and no goals conceded in 15 hours of Championship football, he’ll have to go some to treat the Conference team to a result here. Rotherham, one win in 12 and Dan Barlaser and Chiedozie Ogbene seemingly heading for the January exit door, look like a bit of a sitting duck at League One highflyers Ipswich. Lifeless Stoke, meanwhile, head to Hartlepool.
Plenty else besides of course, but I’m not going to waste your time or mine coming up with pithy lines for Reading v Watford, Luton v Wigan, Norwich v Blackburn and so on. Over at LegoLand Kew I’m sure Spartak Hounslow will be the best team West Ham have played all season, and as Southampton notch up six league defeats in a row and the natives start to grow weary of their new boss ahead of a cup trip to Crippled Alice, please enjoy this sequence of Nathan Jones coaching with me doing a Nathan Jones impression dubbed over the top of it.
Referee: Steve Martin starred as George Banks in the Charles Shyer-directed 1991 comedy Father of the Bride and its subsequent 1995 sequel - details.
QPR: Rangers’ 2020/21 round three exit at the hands of Fulham was the fiftieth time Rangers have been beaten at this stage of the FA Cup, more than any other club. That total has been topped up substantially in recent years — the R’s have been eliminated at the third round stage in 13 of the last 18 seasons. Things have got a little better of late though, with a round four game at Peterborough last season, another against Sheff Wed in 2019/20, and the dizzying heights of a round five loss to Watford in 2018/19. Those victories against Leeds and Portsmouth after a replay under Steve McClaren were QPR’s best FA Cup performance since 1996/97 when Trevor Sinclair’s bicycle kick secured a round five trip to Wimbledon. We haven’t been further than round five since a 1994/95 quarter final at Man Utd, the club’s best performance in this competition since they got to the same stage in 1989/90. All of this means we have been beyond round four of the FA Cup only four times in the last 30 years. League One opposition should bring us out in hives too: the August loss to Charlton on penalties was the sixth season in a row we’ve been eliminated from a cup competition by a team from the division below, including the last five years in the League Cup. All four of Ilias Chair’s goals this season have come from outside the box, more than any other player in the Championship — seven of his last nine are from outside the box.
Fleetwood: The Cod Army have already beaten Championship opposition in cup competition this season, having punted Wigan out of the League Cup in the first round back in August — Gerard Garner scoring after 24 minutes to win the game 1-0, though they subsequently lost 1-0 at home to Everton in the next round. To reach the third round of the FA Cup they have had to overcome a pair of National League South teams — a 3-1 home win against Oxford City, and a 1-0 victory away to Ebbsfleet. These victories are something of a contrast to their results in general this season which have been dominated by draws. Eleven league draws is the joint highest total in League One with Lincoln, and the most ties of any team in the top four divisions. They’ve drawn a further three times in the EFL Trophy too. Only one draw in the last seven games, mind. Fleetwood’s stats portray an awkward, stubborn team to play. To go with the 14 draws from 31 games played so far there have been just eight defeats, and they’re yet to lose by a margin greater than one. There have been seven stoppage time goals in Fleetwood games this season, costing them draws against Barnsley, Exeter and Bolton but earning them back against Ipswich, Lincoln and Bristol Rovers and securing a win at MK Dons. Luton loanees Carlton Mendes Gomes (five) and Admiral Muskwe (three) are the top scorers here. Fleetwood have been to round three of the FA Cup on five occasions, starting in season 2010/11 with Jamie Vardy in attack, but never further.
Prediction: Prediction League goes on hiatus for the cup games, giving Cheesy a well-earned week off. As is now tradition I step in and say we’re going to draw, landing us a replay we don’t want or need a week on Tuesday. Replays are back for the third and fourth rounds this year, and Fleetwood have drawn more than any other team in the league.
LFW’s Prediction: Fleetwood 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Tyler Roberts.
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